• Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    One of the issues with capitalist narratives is that they are very good at rebranding successful socialist initiatives as “responsible capitalism”. Also it likes to point at non-market socialism and claim that’s what socialism looks like completely ignoring market socialism and social democracy.

    Also you really need to check your history. The 12 hour day was looked at as the standard before 1926 in America though 100 hour work weeks were not unheard of. Overtime pay was not a thing it was all flat rate. Ford gets the credit for adopting what was then a long standing issue campaigned for by labor to show “actually it’s beneficial for capitalist interests!” but the idea as it applies to modern labor was originally campaigned for by Robert Owen in 1818 and was being implemented across Europe by socialist labor parties starting in the 1850’s. Ford just basically swooped in last second and like capitalists do stamped his bloody name on it.

    What a vacation looked like for a lot of people pre - vacation pay was you packed up to the countryside to work an non-mechanizable agricultural job like hop picking. Labor day and the American origin of the paid vacation itself comes from the Haymarket mass rally of socialist interest in 1887.

    So yeah, it’s not really as questionable as you make it seem.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      I mean, there’s no particular narrative in my comment - but there is one in yours.

      So yeah, it’s not really as questionable as you make it seem.

      I’d say you are arguing against something you’ve imagined. The subject your whole narrative is built around is touched in my comment by the following words: “life of a factory worker surely sucked”. And that’s it.

      So you’ve basically illustrated this observation, I’ll quote myself:

      I mean, there’s that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus’ rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).

      • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        That’s some short term memory loss there biddy. You seem to have left all the stuff I was responding to on the table… And quoting yourself OOF. I am embarrassed on your behalf

        It’s like you don’t remember saying any of this :

        Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn’t look nice, I’m thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren’t necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.

        I would suggest reading a bit more into the labor practices of the 18th and 19th centuries and the labour movements of the 19th and 20th otherwise you really are gunna just keep playing pretend and talking out of your ass about this pastoral fantasy and this conversation is really gunna leave you behind.